Reunion at the Airport
Choi Young-shik stepped off the plane with a stiff body he could no longer ignore. He couldn't quite hide the disappointment on his face. It was his first flight from Korea to the United States, and the journey had lasted more than ten hours. He'd heard plenty of stories, some of them ridiculous—like the claim that you had to take your shoes off before boarding—but a small part of him had still hoped for something more. Sitting in one seat for over ten hours left every muscle aching. Listening to music or playing games on his Tiffany phone could only distract him for so long. Sleep would have been the better option, except the man in the next seat had started snoring the moment he closed his eyes. Every time Young-shik began to drift off, a thunderous rumble jolted him awake. He briefly regretted turning down Jae-won's offer of business or first class.
That regret stemmed from refusing Jae-won's generosity. Jae-won had gone out of his way to help with Young-shik's move to America, treating their friendship as something unchanging. He had handled the Stanford admission paperwork and even arranged a place to live. Young-shik had wanted the full college experience of living in a dorm, but Jae-won insisted that true student life meant having your own place. Accepting a plane ticket on top of everything else felt like too much, so Young-shik had used the money he'd saved from part-time jobs to buy his own ticket.
“Agh, I think I’m alive again.”
After stretching outside the gate, Young-shik went to claim his luggage. For someone about to start a new life in America, his belongings fit into a single suitcase: a few changes of clothes, a toothbrush, a towel, and his most prized possession—the iWorks laptop. Feeling somewhat restored, he headed toward baggage claim. While preparing for his studies abroad, he had studied airport procedures thoroughly and asked friends for advice, so the process felt familiar. His suitcase stood out immediately. His classmates had pooled their money to buy it as a Stanford acceptance gift and covered it with stickers as a memento.
Next came immigration.
“OK, PASS.”
The word startled him. He had heard enough horror stories about U.S. immigration to be nervous despite his English studies. His palms were damp as he answered the officer’s questions and presented his documents—chief among them his Stanford acceptance letter. The officer even offered congratulations. Young-shik felt a pang of embarrassment for the months he had spent doubting himself when the answer had been so clear all along.
Once through the checkpoint, the tension finally eased. The air itself felt different from Korea’s—artificially scented yet somehow off, as if someone had tried to improve it and failed. So this is what America smells like, he thought.
“Young-shik!”
A voice called his name in perfect Korean intonation.
“Over here! Here!”
He turned and saw a face both achingly familiar and larger than life waving at him with unmistakable warmth. In childhood, the boy had been an object of distant admiration. During the first stirrings of puberty, he had seemed an insurmountable wall that brought crushing inferiority. At the time, Young-shik had been too confused by his own feelings to know how to react. Now, having accepted that he could never catch up, he simply felt grateful for the steady friendship Yoo Jae-won still offered.
While driving to the airport to meet the flight, Jae-won had let his thoughts drift to memories of Young-shik. The quiet boy from elementary school had revealed an unexpected talent for computers, and Jae-won had supported him in every way he could. In middle school, that talent had extended to academics, and Young-shik began to stand out. Then high school brought trouble. A late-blooming adolescence had led to aimless wandering that threatened his college plans. He had intended to follow Jae-won to Stanford, but a disastrous SAT score cost him a year. Unlike the Korean CSAT, which could only be taken once annually, the SAT was offered seven times a year—yet he had still failed to reach the required score until the final attempt.
Jae-won, who had always rated Young-shik’s abilities highly, had been shocked by the news. He had even considered deploying his information team to investigate before realizing it was unnecessary. Their mutual friend Jumin and the others already knew the reason: Young-shik’s crisis had been caused by Jae-won himself.
“I suppose I really am that impressive.”
Jae-won wasn’t suffering from delusions of grandeur. He maintained a coldly objective view of his own presence and achievements precisely because that clarity was required to execute his long-term master plan. His accomplishments were unprecedented and, he believed, unrepeatable. Yet they had not come from innate genius; they had come from thirty years of future knowledge no one else possessed. Young-shik had tried to emulate him anyway, and the strain had been inevitable. Even if Young-shik had truly been a genius, another problem would have remained: the love triangle.
“This is the sort of thing you only read about in books,” Jae-won muttered.
He already had Tiffany as his fiancée. Barring complications, they would likely marry within two years—before the calendar flipped to 2000. When he and Tiffany became a couple, Jae-won had told his friends right after informing his parents. Only Sookyung had received the news secondhand through his parents because the timing had felt awkward. She had hesitated briefly, knowing she liked him, but afterward their friendship had seemed intact. Hearts, however, did not reset like computer settings. Sookyung’s feelings for Jae-won had persisted. Young-shik, in turn, had feelings for Sookyung. He had believed that to win her attention he needed to surpass Jae-won in at least one area, and he had worked desperately toward that goal. The effort had been doomed from the start. Even in programming—Young-shik’s greatest strength—Jae-won already stood on a level no one could reach. Everything else was simply beyond comparison. Meanwhile, Sookyung’s family business had grown at an astonishing pace. No matter how hard Young-shik tried, nothing went right, and his frustration was understandable.
Jae-won had been surprised that someone as diligent as Young-shik had faltered, but he felt no disappointment. Wandering in youth was natural. Jae-won himself had once drifted far more severely. The root cause, however, was a love triangle he could not resolve. Even someone who appeared omnipotent to others had limits; changing another person’s heart remained beyond his power. That Young-shik had managed to pull himself together so quickly was the real surprise. Perhaps the damage still lingered beneath the surface. America might have seemed like an escape.
“Well, the future is always uncertain.”
Jae-won had no idea how things would unfold. If Young-shik fully realized his potential, he might rise even higher than anyone expected. Jae-won had always held his friend’s talent in high regard.
“Boss, we’ve arrived.”
Lost in thought, Jae-won only noticed they had reached the airport when Greg spoke. Moments later he spotted Young-shik at the gate, eyes wide as he scanned the crowd.
“Young-shik! Over here!”
The familiar voice made Young-shik’s rabbit-like eyes lock onto him at once.
“Wow, you’ve grown a lot in a year. What have you been eating?”
Jae-won couldn’t resist commenting on the height difference the moment they met. Through careful diet and exercise, he had managed to reach 177 centimeters—fourteen centimeters taller than in his previous life. He considered the result satisfactory. Young-shik, however, looked easily over 180 centimeters after just a year apart.
“Huh? I didn’t do anything special. It just happened, I guess.”
Young-shik scratched his head, embarrassed by the praise. The old habit remained even after his brief detour. Yet he seemed far more outgoing than before, and the awkwardness between them had vanished.
“Let’s go. I’ll show you the place you’ll be living first.”
After a few minutes of catching up, Jae-won guided him toward the waiting car.
“Whoa, you’ve got a W220 too.”
Young-shik recognized the car immediately. Jae-won, who cared little for automobiles, only realized it was the 1998 Mercedes-Benz S-Class—the seventh generation—when Young-shik named it.
“Sookyung has the same one. That’s how I knew.”
The mention of Sookyung lowered Young-shik’s excited tone. Her family’s chicken franchise had long since joined the ranks of major corporations. The IMF crisis had affected them, of course, but Jae-won’s advice to avoid reckless expansion had kept the damage minimal. Greg loaded the suitcase into the trunk with ease, and the two friends climbed into the car.
“Don’t envy me over a single car. Once you join ID Group, you’ll be able to buy one like this without trouble.”
“Really?”
“Of course. The average salary for programmers at ID Technology or Android already exceeds the price of this car.”
The average annual salary for programmers at ID Group had long surpassed 100 million won, whether they worked in Korea or the United States. Within that group, those recognized as S-Class—like the Alpha Team—commanded two or three times that amount.
“Whoa, that’s insane!”
Young-shik’s reaction was immediate. Salaries were personal, so he had never dared ask, yet the reality exceeded anything he had imagined. In the midst of the IMF crisis, Korean graduates were desperate for jobs while companies conducted mass layoffs. Hearing that a new hire could earn over 100 million won sounded like a dream.
“But I hope you won’t be satisfied with being just an ordinary programmer.”
Jae-won’s words weren’t finished.
“Huh? Aren’t all programmers the same?”
“Not at all.”
Jae-won spoke firmly to the innocent question, then began explaining his personal theory of programmers.
“I divide programmers into three categories.”
“Three?”
“Coders, programmers, and elite programmers.”
Coders simply wrote code for programs whose architecture had already been decided. They could read and write programming languages but struggled beyond that. Without existing code or libraries, they couldn’t move forward.
“Ah. I’ve seen plenty of those.”
Young-shik nodded. Having received special training from Jae-won and continued studying on his own, he had long since left the coder stage behind. He had also spent time in online programming communities and encountered many people who only knew how to read and write code yet acted as experts.
“Programmers understand the programs they create, can implement them, optimize them for the system, and fix unexpected errors.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. That’s the minimum requirement.”
Young-shik agreed enthusiastically. ID Group’s hiring process already tested for exactly those abilities, which was why applicants who had only taken crash courses rarely passed. Even those who slipped through were quickly exposed when given tasks beyond a coder’s capability. Coders still had roles at ID Group—assisting programmers with implementation—but their compensation was roughly one-third that of full programmers: twenty-five to thirty million won. The gap between programmers and elite programmers was equally large.
“Elites are the rare few among programmers who can simplify complex problems, invent new algorithms, and oversee massive projects.”
“Like you?”
Jae-won nodded without hesitation. To some, the PC was an open system where programmers could build whatever they envisioned. Countless word processors existed, yet only one or two achieved market dominance. Elite programmers were the developers capable of creating those standout programs through unique ability.
Young-shik’s excited expression darkened. The love triangle had been the largest source of his pain, but failing to match Jae-won’s ability had been a close second. The weight of that realization pressed down on him again.
“It’s all right. There’s a way.”
Jae-won remained unconcerned. He believed elite-level skill was not innate but could be cultivated with proper guidance. Young-shik had nothing to worry about—ID Group already employed many elite programmers, and Jae-won himself was the best teacher in the world.
“Boss, we’ve arrived.”
Greg announced their arrival while the two were still talking. The house was the same one Jae-won’s parents had prepared when he first entered Stanford. Filled with memories, he had never sold it. Now it would be Young-shik’s home—rented at a fair rate, not given away or heavily discounted. Friends had asked how Young-shik could afford it, but he was both a Stanford freshman and an intern at ID Technology. The internship paid far better than typical student jobs, easily covering rent.
After a hearty dinner together, Jae-won promised to show Young-shik the ID Technology headquarters the next day. He never kept that promise. Just as things had seemed to quiet down under the Jeon Myeong-heon administration, a major scandal erupted in Korea. Daeho Group, ranked third among Korean conglomerates, had its accounting fraud and fraudulent loans exposed.